Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh gave me a nice mention on his program. Rush’s point was that the targeting of voters based on such markers as their consumer habits and other behavior has been around politics for a long time, and that the whole Cambridge Analytica “scandal” is a fake news scandal.

Here’s what Rush said:

You remember Richard Viguerie? Does the name ring a bell? What was Richard Viguerie’s claim to fame, Mr. Snerdley? Richard Viguerie was the direct mail king. Richard Viguerie figured out how to use, and so did Karl Rove. Karl Rove put himself on the Republican map by being able to target direct mail to the right people. You drive through a neighborhood and you see a guy that’s got a concrete birdbath in the front yard, or this or that, you figure the guy’s a do-it-yourselfer. So you direct mail him in ways that appeal to him to get him to vote for your guy.

I mean, this stuff has been done for eons! It’s been done for ages. It’s just before there was the internet and Facebook, they had to use the postal service to reach people. But what’s going on here is nothing new, and they’re trying to scandalize this. They’re trying to scandalize it and they’re going to try to regulate it, all because they think you’re stupid and you’re an idiot and you fell for all of these social media attempts to get you to vote for Trump. See, you’re not bright enough. If you were really smart you would have seen the light, you wouldn’t have even voted for Trump.

With all due respect to Rush, what’s he mean by “was”?

At 84 I’m still working 13 – 14 hours a day leading my team of 70 outstanding writers, graphic artists, account executives and production staff at the nation’s largest and oldest conservative direct marketing company. While Rush was right about behavioral targeting being a strategy I pioneered, there’s more to the power of political direct marketing than just targeting.

As I explained in my book TAKEOVER:

It was hard, if not impossible, to find the conservative point of view on television. Walter Cronkite of CBS and his establishment media colleagues at ABC and NBC would go on air at 6:30 p.m., and by 7:00 p.m. America would have been told what to think— and it wouldn’t be that communism was evil and dangerous and that lower taxes, less government, and more freedom were good ideas...

The one means we had to get our message out, to share ideas, and to bypass the establishment media filter, was direct mail—the first and most long-lived form of new and alternative media.

Direct mail wasn’t and isn’t just a way to raise money. The way I used it – and use it today for our many conservative clients – it is as a form of media; it educates, it informs, it persuades, and it provides news and information that recipients won’t get through the establishment media.

Later talk radio, led by Rush Limbaugh, and the internet added to the ability of conservatives to bypass the establishment media filter – and I might add we have a very effective and long-lived digital marketing team here at American Target Advertising – but our ability to use the internet to bypass the establishment media and get the conservative message to today’s conservative – populist grassroots audiences is under attack.

The Cambridge Analytica fake news scandal is, in my opinion, the now-leading edge of the Left’s ongoing effort to censor and control internet content.

Starting in 1965, we built and now own data on 12 million conservative donors and activists to whom we send hundreds of millions of letters and emails on behalf of our conservative clients, and we reach millions more through the internet and social media.

Through censorship and limits on access, liberal tech and media moguls such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and others are trying to impose their Leftwing progressive values on America the same way the old CBS, ABC and NBC network bosses imposed their brand of liberalism on American audiences in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.

Direct mail remains the one avenue of communication that cannot be censored by the establishment elite, which is why it remains the workhorse of direct marketing and the most reliable way to freely communicate conservative ideas.